The Roswell incident: What really happened in the desert of New Mexico in
1947? Separating the facts from fiction

The event takes place annually on the second Tuesday in February and was created to “celebrate and honour all past, present and future alien visitors”.

It began in 2003 when Daniel Foley, a Republican from Roswell, saw his proposal approved in the House of Representatives.

It said aliens have contributed to the recognition of New Mexico, with the state associated with little green men since the purported UFO crash in 1947.

We take a look back at the infamous Roswell incident.

What happened

On July 8 1947, an object crashed near a rancher’s home in Roswell, New Mexico, during a powerful storm.

Rancher W.W. “Mack” Brazel retrieved some of the metal debris and many witnesses associated with the incident noted its unusual properties.

“The odd thing about this foil was that you could wrinkle it and lay it back down and it immediately resumed its original shape,” William Brazel Jr, Mack’s son, reportedly said in a witness statement.

The “flying disk”

Suspicion was fuelled after Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut announced in a press release that a "flying disc" had been recovered.

Hours later, as government scientists arrived in the area, it was stated instead that a weather balloon had crashed.

Aliens?

Closer encounters Photo: Columbia Pictures

The incident soon became largely forgotten until 1978 when physicist Stanton T. Friedman interviewed Major Jesse Marcel, who had been involved in recovering debris in 1947.

Major Marcel claimed that the US government covered up the existence of an alien aircraft, sparking years of conspiracy theories.

In a deathbed admission, Haut said the weather balloon was a cover story and claimed to have seen aliens.

A Soviet plot?

Stalin Photo: AFP

In her book 'Area 51', author Annie Jacobsen put forward the theory that Roswell 'was a Soviet plot to create US panic'.

“They found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall,” she wrote.

“They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes.”

The Roswell Report

The US Air Force published a report about the incident in 1994. It said the debris was from a balloon-borne research project code named MOGUL.

MOGUL was a classified project to “determine the state of Soviet nuclear weapons” using microphones to detect long-distance sound waves.

The 1997 report

The Air Force’s 224-page Roswell Report: Case Closed concluded that the “aliens” reported were probably anthropomorphic test dummies carried by the balloons.

“We're confident once the report is out and digested by the public that this will be the final word on the Roswell incident,” said Col. John Haynes, deputy chief of the Air Force Declassification Review Team.